Gareth Smith, Byron Bay
Alon Liel, a former Israeli foreign ministry director general and ex-ambassador to South Africa, has called on President Barack Obama to stay home if he didn’t intend to warn Israelis about the dangers of an approaching ‘apartheid cliff’.
‘In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state – in the hope that the status quo is temporary – is an apartheid state,’ Liel said at a Jerusalem conference about whether Israel is or could become an apartheid state.
‘As someone who knows the original apartheid well, and also knows the state of Israel quite well – I was born here, grew up here, served and fought for it for 30 years – someone like me knows that Zionism isn’t apartheid and the state of Israel that I grew up in wasn’t an apartheid state,’ Liel emphasised.
‘I’m here today because I came to the conclusion that the occupation of the West Bank as it exists today is a sort of Israeli apartheid,’ said Liel. ‘The occupation became a hump on the back of Zionism; it has now become the hump of the state of Israel.’
